Sunday trading

Closed for business

A French row over the day of rest

IN FRANCE, as elsewhere, Sunday tends to be odd-jobs day. If you forget to buy the right drill bit ahead of time, however, you may be doomed to frustration. DIY stores are among the great majority of retail businesses that are supposed to close on the official day of rest. That now looks set to change.

On Sunday September 29th 14 Castorama and Leroy Merlin stores on the outskirts of Paris opened their doors in defiance of a court order. Employees wore shirts proclaiming “Yes Weekend”, in a Gallic take on Barack Obama’s 2008 mantra. Shoppers signed petitions. Unions protested. Politicians took sides. The government, divided on Sunday trading as on many other issues, handed on the hot potato for further study. Suggestions for change are due in November.

Maintaining Sunday as a mandatory day off has little to do with religion. It is more about preserving a certain idea of France, involving long lunches en famille and a day free from consumerism, and about unions’ determination to keep work in its (limited) place.

Ranged against these defenders of the ban are workers who get fatter pay packets for a Sunday shift (many of the DIY companies’ Sunday workers are students), company bosses who rely on the day for 15-20% of total turnover, weekend shoppers and others in favour of liberalising France’s rigid labour rules. Whether Sunday trading increases sales overall or just redistributes them is debated. But with the unemployment rate at 10.5%, rising to 24.6% among the young, any prospect of creating jobs by easing restrictions should be seized on.

Over time, Sunday rest has been punctured by all sorts of exceptions anyway. Almost a third of wage-earners work on Sundays. Shops may be open on one side of the road and closed on the other. Furniture and garden stores are allowed to trade on Sundays but not DIY stores, though they stock many of the same things. Castorama and Leroy Merlin have been opening outlets near Paris on Sundays for years, thinking, they say, that they had the right to do so. A competitor filed the complaint against them.

Elsewhere in Europe there is also pressure to ease Sunday rules. Britain, where the high street is already largely deregulated, has not made permanent the increase in store-opening hours during London’s Olympic Games. Spain and Italy, though, have relaxed rules in the hope of more sales and jobs. It is not clear that either has emerged.

But for merchants and shoppers the Sunday ban matters. Traditional shops are losing customers to online commerce, which has been growing at around 15% a year in France, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Websites are open all hours. The one thing they do not do—at least not yet—is deliver the missing drill bit when the DIYer has time to drill.